Fiber optic ring system design involves a balance between the need to provide protection for multiple channels of communication, the desire to maximize the bandwidth available for the communications function of the network, and the costs of constructing and maintaining the network. In a single-fiber ring where bandwidth considerations are secondary, a separate protection channel can be reserved for each communications channel. Such arrangements, while effective and readily implemented, often have unacceptable high overhead at the expense of revenue generating traffic.
In some systems, signals are sent in both the clockwise and the counterclockwise directions. The protection function takes advantage of the fact that a given signal can reach its destination via two distinct paths.
Many known wavelength division multiplexing (WDM) fiber optic transmission systems are deployed for communications between two end nodes. In this configuration, to protect against optical transponder failures, some systems use a one-by-one protection scheme.
In a one-by-one protection scheme, each working transponder has its own dedicated protection transponder. Some other systems use a one-by-N protection scheme, where one protection transponder serves to protect N working transponders. The same kind of protection schemes can be used in a ring configuration as are used for transporting multiple wavelengths, in the point-to-point configuration. As a result, in some known systems, required protection channels carried over a single fiber are equal to the number of two-node communications on the ring.